Rural People's Voice Sees Results Of Grassroots Organizing in North Central Washington
Backing candidates they feel will work for working people, two-thirds of those they supported won this year
Since 2020, a grassroots non-profit called Rural People’s Voice has been working to support candidates who will prioritize working people over special interests in North Central Washington. And with Wenatchee School Board member Maria Iñiguez’s win over Chelan County GOP-backed Randy Smith yesterday, 10 of the 15 candidates RVP backed won their races this year.
It’s about supporting a vision – not just a candidate, said co-director Adrianne Moore.
“We really believe one candidate isn’t going to save us,” she said. “It’s really about all of us coming together around the issues and toward the vision of a better economy for all of us.”
The measures of a good economy are more than just a booming stock market, low gas prices, or the average billionaire’s ability to buy that second yacht. To Moore, a good economy is “based on the conditions that allow us all to thrive.” Access to a good education, quality healthcare, affordable housing, and fair wages are all factors in what makes a good economy.
Moore started thinking about these issues while working at social services organization in the Methow Valley called Room One.
“What I saw in my time there through the mid-aughts to the mid-teens is that it was getting increasingly harder – so things like childcare skyrocketing in costs, housing skyrocketing in costs, healthcare became just astronomically hard to get for a lot of folks and wages were stagnating,” she said.
And they started seeing new clientele. “Normal people” who you wouldn’t expect to be in crisis.
“Like teachers and grocery store clerks and just like normal people who were working full-time jobs and just couldn’t make it anymore,” Moore said.
That her got her thinking more about policy and how to change the status quo. So she started talking to elected leaders about what could be done upstream to change the outcomes she was seeing in rural Okanogan County.
“It quickly became clear that they didn’t share the same perspective on what people needed in North Central Washington,” she said. “They just had a different idea of what it meant to support working people and it didn’t feel like that’s what they wanted to do. A lot of the folks we were talking to really felt like their job was to support business and infrastructure rather than everyday working people.”
You can listen to a clip from that portion of our interview here:
So she started working on campaigns and quickly realized that there was a debilitating level of division in Eastern Washington politics, especially among moderate and left-leaning voters.
“We really needed to bring people together across divides (we were super divided) to vote for leaders who were going to work for all of us, not just those at the top,” she said.
So she, along with her partner, Elana Mainer, co-founded RPV to back candidates they felt would bring people together and support working people.
Listen to a clip from our interview about that here:
So they, along with a 32-person steering committee, a small staff, and a large cadre of volunteers, have moved the needle in North Central Washington. And while their messaging might align more with progressive or moderate candidates, they have supported Republicans, and do not claim any party affiliation.
In 202 they made an independent expenditure on behalf of and canvassed for Republican Mike Morrison, who unseated incumbent Brian Burnett in his bid for re-election as Chelan County Sheriff.
This year, two-thirds of the candidates they backed won their elections, including Maria Iñiguez who won a hard-fought race to keep her seat on the Wenatchee School Board.
“The work they did for me and the support was amazing,” Iñiguez said. “I probably could not have been successful without them.”
Moore said of the candidates she’s worked with, Iñiguez did more to win her race than anyone she’d ever seen. According to Iñiguez, she knocked on about 1000 doors in her district and between herself and three others, her campaign canvassed about 2000 households. She also sent a mailer, waved signs, had a social media presence and appeared at any public forum to which she was invited.
During her campaign, Iñiguez was called a “Marxist” and was dressed down at a Wenatchee World debate by her opponent Randy Smith for speaking Spanish in public.
Iñiguez won her race by just 14 votes.
The fact that a woman of color with a masters degree in education faced such racially-charged animus from her opponent, the local Moms for Liberty chapter and those who support them both financially and culturally doesn’t come as a surprise to Iñiguez, or other women or color working to change a status quo in a community where the elected officials are overwhelming white and male.
For Teresa Bendito, organizing manager for RVP, it’s one of the reasons she’s doing this work.
“It's crucial to engage historically under-represented individuals in local politics as they deserve equal representation. When folks from all walks of life are in office, we get better solutions. Right now, lots of people don't see their experiences represented in elected positions,” she said. “So, having a mix of people—like immigrants, working-class folks, single moms, and those in the trades—in office means we'll come up with better ideas and find new solutions to our big problems.”
Bendito agrees with Iñiguez in that their canvassing made a difference in school board elections. But Bendito saw the impact across the entire region.
“I believe our canvassing efforts significantly impacted the community and influenced election outcomes by reaching more people, discussing the campaign's importance, explaining redistricting for school board, and emphasizing the significance of voting,” she said.
Many of the folks she was going door to door with are young, and passionate about seeing a change in how the business of politics has been done in our region for the last few decades.
“I take pride in our collaborative efforts within the RPV team. Despite rapidly expanding our team in a short amount of time. Many of us being newcomers, we were provided with ways to use our diverse talents to reach more people in our communities,” Bendito said. “I'm also proud of all the canvassing done by our interns. They wholeheartedly embraced our vision and carried out this essential work, rain or shine.”
The Future of Local Politics – Unity, Not Division
Moore sees bringing people together as the path forward for success in local politics. In her eyes, most folks in rural America basically want the same thing, regardless of what their party affiliation is. Affordable housing, quality healthcare and public education and good jobs are more important to most people.
The strategy of using “wedge issues” (a term coined by Newt Gingrich) like guns or abortion or immigration to divide voters doesn’t work as well as it once did, and those aren’t issues most folks consider when voting for their mayor, or city councilors or school board members.
In Moore’s eyes, bringing people together and cultivating new leadership in our region should be the priority moving forward.
“In North Central Washington, like so many rural areas, we don’t tend to have a very diverse leadership body, you know it’s often the good old boys rather than everyday working people who are elected to office,” Moore said. “And so we want people to think differently about who might be the kinds of folks we need to elect into office and to see themselves and their neighbors in those leadership roles.”
You can listen to a clip from that portion of our interview here:
Yes!!! More of this please. Thank you Ms. Moore and your team.
Very encouraging to see the focus on local government activity. And it sure seems this group has youth on its team. Wonderful to see.